Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Pgpool-II 3.2 release is getting closer

I'm back!

Almost one year worth of development, pgpool-II 3.2 release is getting closer. This version has two major new features:

On memory query cache

Built in HA

On memory query cache is similar to MySQL's query cache. Caching query SELECT query results by matching literal query string. Unlike MySQL's query cache, you have choice of two types of cache storage: shared memory or memcached. If your server has enough memory, share memory query cache is the best choice because it's faster. If you have separate server which has large memory, memcached might be your choice. If you plan to have multiple pgpool instances, memcached is the only choice. I will explain this feature in another blog entry.

Built in HA is called "watch dog" in pgpool's document. As you might know, pgpool itself could be a SPOF(Single Point Of Failure) because if pgpool goes down, there's no way for applications to access database unless they directly access PostgreSQL. Traditionally we recommend to use "pgpool-HA" to solve the problem. Why we need to have builtin HA then? Well, it is easier for users to use, and this brings another "bonus": better coordination of multiple pgpool instances. I will talk about this in another blog entry.

When will be the 3.2 released? We already released beta2 and plan to release RC1 this week. So we expect to have official release by the end of July 2012.

Please help us in testing pgpool-II 3.2 beta! You can download it from: